During a break in the taping of her Rosie Show Friday, host Rosie O’Donnell announced her engagement to girlfriend Michelle Rounds to the surprised studio audience. “They are engaged, but no date has been set,” O’Donnell’s rep confirmed to Us Weekly. The couple plans to wed over Christmas.
Rounds, a New York City headhunter, caught the eye of O’Donnell at Starbucks over the summer. The couple made their public debut in September. O’Donnell later told Nightline’s Cynthia McFadden that she was attracted to Rounds from the moment they first met.
“I thought she was a 28-year-old heterosexual girl, because that’s what she looked like to me. And she’s a 40-year-old gay woman,” O’Donnell, 49, told Nightline. “My gaydar was way off!”
“But I think if I had known that she was gay, I wouldn’t have been brave enough to talk to her,” she added. “She’s very beautiful, it’s very strange. And she’s really lovely, and we laugh a lot.”
The couple will split their time between New York and Chicago, where The Rosie Show is filmed for OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network.
